Antonia Darder - Culture and Power in the Classroom (Series in Critical Narrative)

CULTURE AND POWER IN THE CLASSROOM

Series in Critical Narrative

Donaldo Macedo, Series Editor
University of Massachusetts Boston

Now in Print

The Hegemony of English

by Donaldo Macedo, Bessie Dendrinos, and

Panayota Gounari (2003)

Letters from Lexington: Reflections on Propaganda

New Updated Edition

by Noam Chomsky (2004)

Pedagogy of Indignation

by Paulo Freire (2004)

Howard Zinn on Democratic Education

by Howard Zinn, with Donaldo Macedo (2005)

How Children Learn: Getting Beyond the Deficit Myth

by Terese Fayden (2005)

The Globalization of Racism

edited by Donaldo Macedo and Panayota Gounari (2006)

Daring to Dream: Toward a Pedagogy of the Unfinished

by Paulo Freire (2007)

Class in Culture

by Teresa L. Ebert and Masud Zavarzadeh (2008)

Dear Paulo: Letters from Those Who Dare Teach

by Sonia Nieto (2008)

Uncommon Sense from the Writings of Howard Zinn (2008) Paulo Freire and the Curriculum

by Georgios Grollios (2009)

Freedom at Work: Language, Professional, and Intellectual Development in Schools

by Mara E. Torres-Guzmn with Ruth Swinney (2009)

The Latinization of U.S. Schools: Successful Teaching and Learning in Shifting Cultural Contexts

by Jason G. Irizarry (2011)

Culture and Power in the Classroom: Educational Foundations for the Schooling of Bicultural Students

by Antonia Darder (2011)

THE TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

Educational Foundations for the Schooling of Bicultural Students

Antonia Darder
With a Foreword by Sonia Nieto

First published 2012 by Paradigm Publishers

Published 2016 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Darder, Antonia.
Culture and power in the classroom : educational foundations for the schooling of bicultural students / Antonia Darder ; with a foreword by Sonia Nieto. The twentieth anniversary ed.
p. cm. (Series in critical narrative)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61205-069-0 (hardback : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-61205-070-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Multicultural educationUnited States. 2. Educational sociologyUnited States. 3. Educational equalizationUnited States. 4. Teaching. I. Title.
LC1099.3.D37 2012
370.1170973dc23

2011022075

Designed and Typeset by Straight Creek Bookmakers.

ISBN 13:978-1-61205-069-0 (hbk)
ISBN 13:978-1-61205-070-6 (pbk)

This book is dedicated to Mr. Horace Viditoe, A. P. Gonzalez, Carol Brunson Day, and Barbara Richardsonbrilliant educators of color who believed in me when I could barely believe in myself.

Donaldo Macedo
Series Editor, University of MassachusettsBoston

At a 1987 CONFERENCE ON THE WORKS OF PAULO FREIRE, THE PRESENCE OF FREIRE himself reenergized the spirit and the vision of the progressive educators gathered that day at the University of California, Irvine, all of whom were adherents to Freires unshakable belief that no matter how difficult, change is possible. one voice in particular called out to me as it passionately and fearlessly denounced patriarchy and white supremacythe voice of Antonia Darder. I still vividly remember sensing her bottled-up energy, her long-submerged voice that was fighting its way to the surface.

Paulos presence at the conference brought renewed to hope to progressive educators such as Tom Wilson, Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Antonia Darder, Anaida Colon-Muniz, and me, a far-flung group that had coalesced around the conviction that it was imperative to fight against the right-wing attacks that were shaping the educational reform debate in the 1980s. As Antonia Darder wrote about that time, liberal influences [were being] suffocated by a politically mean-spirited neo-conservative movement, which began to gain momentum and prominence in the 1980s through the support of former Secretary of Education William Bennett. This reactionary movement was fast appropriating the educational narrative with its call for the common utilization of behavioral objectives and, more recently, standardization of knowledge as a framework for the curriculum development and implementation. This call constituted a spirited defense of Western tradition as exemplified by Allan Blooms book, The Closing of the American Mind, which had tapped the [conservative] and the elitists collective nerve (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1988, p. 177).

Although Darders unrelenting interrogations during her interventions at the Freire conference made some people uncomfortable, her comments presaged the current obscene Arizonafication of America, as Latinas/os and other non-white ethnic groups are subjected to incessant attacks by ultra-right conservative politicians and talking heads who blame the ills of U.S. societyfrom rising crime rates to economic insecurityon the presence of undocumented immigrants. They conveniently overlook the fact that these same immigrants constitute the backbone of our economy in the service and agricultural sectors from California to the Carolinas. By stirring peoples fear and normalizing xenophobia, the antiimmigrant movement made racial profiling legal in Arizona, and twenty-three other states are moving quickly to pass similarly draconian laws to contain the invasion of what former presidential candidate David Duke referred to as hordes of dusty third world peoples. Duke went on to say that with each passing hour our economic well-being, cultural heritage, freedom, and racial roots are being battered into oblivion (cited in Macedo & Bartolom, 1999, p. 12).

Antonia Darders new edition of Culture and Power in the Classroom is particularly timely given the insidious xenophobia that is now shaping our society and the efforts underway at many U.S. higher education institutions to close down ethnic studies. Meanwhile, the penal system hustles to build more jails to house those who have been ethnically profiled and excluded. This book provides educators with critical counterhegemonic tools to deconstruct the dominant ideologys defense of the tradition espoused by Allan Bloom, E. D. Hirsch, and other conservative scholars. In a pointed attack on multicultural education, they argue that multicultural education should be abandoned in favor of a reemphasis on content that is rooted in our common cultural background and knowledge. The brilliance of Darders proposals lies in her courage to indict both conservative and liberal educators who fail to recognize that the common culture considers the term descriptive rather than anthropological and political. As Aronowitz and Giroux (1988), write, [The common cultures] meaning is fixed in the past, and its essence is that it provides the public with a common referent for communication and exchange (p. 187). Darder astutely problematizes the notion of common culture as nothing less than a veiled information-banking model based on a selective selection of the features of Western cultures that dismisses the notion that culture has any determinate relation to the practices of power and politics or is largely defined as part of an ongoing struggle to move history, experience, knowledge, and the meaning of everyday life in ones own terms (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1988, p. 186). Her critique goes beyond a denunciation of the dominant fossilized encyclopedia of mainstream pedagogy that selectively leaves out other important cultural facts. She is equally critical of liberal multicultural education that, for all its promises, ends up celebrating an equally fossilized pedagogy that is devoid of any discussion of power relations that show how ideology is present in capitalist social relationships based on class interests that in practice negate autonomy, despite adherence to the doctrine of individualism [where]... capitalisms individualist ideological underpinnings simultaneously emphasize and deny the individuals subjectivity. Thus, Darder correctly interrogates the expansion of so-called multicultural education, with its rapid growth of textbooks ostensibly designed to teach racial and cultural tolerance. what these educational texts in fact do is hide the asymmetrical distribution of power and cultural capital through a form of paternalism that promises a dose of tolerance to the otherin other words, I will tolerate you. Missing from this message is a sense of mutual respect and even racial and cultural solidarity. As David Theo Goldberg (1993) argues, tolerance presupposes that its object is morally repugnant, that it really needs to be reformed, that is, altered (p. 6.).